More details about the technical and descriptive affordances of the various Web 2.0 platforms are availablehttp://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Distribution_platforms_for_UKOER_resources the descriptions of tools included below have been drawn from this work (these have been primarily created by my colleague Phil Barker with input from the community)

Scribd

“Scribd allows the sharing of documents, including short reports, posters, presentation slides, magazines, sheet music or full-length books. Typical use is for static text-and-image documents but spreadsheets are also handled. …Documents are viewable on the Scribd website and embeddable in webpages elsewhere in the iPaper format (which requires a Flash reader). Files on Scribd can be distributed either freely and openly, for fee, or privately.” (http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Scribd_for_UKOER_resources)

Scribd is being used by:

OERP (Engineering)

CORE Materials

C-SAP OER

Projects in which academics are uploading to Scribd

OERP (Engineering) – central team to begin with moving to individuals for sustainability

Projects using the Scribd API

CORE Materials

Slideshare

“SlideShare’s core service is as a host for presentations, e.g. PowerPoint slides. These can be simple slide stacks, or can be slidecasts or videocasts which include audio or video commentary to accompany the slides. Recently SlideShare has added support for more general text and graphics “documents”.” (http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/SlideShare_for_UKOER_resources).”

Slideshare is being used by:

OTTER

OLE Dutch History

OERP (Engineering)

CORE Materials

Skills for Scientists

C-SAP OER

Projects using Slideshare as well as another form of repository [not including JORUM]

CORE Materials (central database)

Projects using the Slideshare API

CORE Materials

Projects in which academics are uploading to Slideshare

OTTER – individuals uploading

OERP (Engineering) – central team uploading to begin with which is moving to individuals for sustainability

C-SAP OER – central team uploading

Projects exploring (but not yet committed to using) Slideshare

OLE Dutch History

Skills for Scientists

iTunes(U)

iTunes is a music and video distribution platform created and run by Apple. It offers a mediated marketplace for content and along with Apple’s hardware has been instrumental in the popularisation of digital delivery of audio and video including podcasts. iTunesU is a developed section of this service allowing institutions to showcase podcasts and video – typically lectures or other audio.

iTunesU being used by:

OCEP

Berlin

OpenSpires

OTTER

mmtv

Projects for whom iTunes has actively determined their approach to the description and delivery (RSS support) of their content

OpenSpires

OTTER

Projects negotiating with their institutions about how their OER content relates to the institutional channel

mmtv

Flickr

“Most of the resources on Flickr are photographs and many of the features of the platform are tailored to this (e.g. the automatic extraction of EXIF metadata to show, for example, camera type, aperture setting and shutter speed), though it is also used for diagrams and other forms of still image. Flickr also supports short (<90s) videos and other types of moving image. Flickr has comprehensive capabilities for metadata tagging, aggregation, syndication through RSS/ATOM.” (http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Flickr_for_UKOER_resources)

Projects using Flickr:

OTTER

OLE Dutch History (considering using it)

OERP

CORE Materials

C-Change (embedding into ppts)

Using the api to upload materials

CORE Materials

Using Flickr as a primary store

OERP

Youtube

“YouTube is the pre-eminent video sharing website. While many of the videos are entertainment (home-shot or otherwise) it is widely used for more serious material and has a YouTube EDU branding for degree-level material. Access to view video is unlimited and any registered user may upload and share videos; the collection of videos provided by a user is known as their channel which also includes user-profile information. Registered users may also create playlists (collections of videos from other users) and comment on videos.” (http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/YouTube_for_UKOER_resources)

Vimeo

“Vimeo is a social web site for video sharing, with a reputation for supporting higher (technical) quality, longer videos than YouTube. The emphasis is on sharing videos created by individual users rather than commercial videos. Socially, vimeo supports user profiles, commenting on video, individual contacts, and subscriptions to channels and membership of groups. ” (http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Vimeo_for_UKOER_resources)

How and how why do academics disseminate their presentations? How does this relate to their other forms of dissemination? What academic and organisational influences affect their dissemination? What influences their choice of tool? What metadata is created about the various things that are disseminated? Who creates that metadata, is the duplication necessary?

Our poster at DC2008 (http://dc2008.de/programme/posters) is a case study of ‘one’ academic’s dissemination of their presentations. It uses the repository ecology approach we’ve been developing and the resulting poster allows some interesting questions to be raised. Here’s a copy for reference…

What are the key changes going on in the world of digital libraries, repositories, and academic life? Over the summer I’ve been thinking a little on some of this – in part been prompted by my aforementioned change in job and in part because I’ve been on holiday and it’s afforded a few moments of reflection. I think these are a number of areas where current practice is beginning to change or be challenged. They certainly aren’t all new, but for one reason or another they’ve popped up on my radar over the past few months.

This is neither an exhaustive list, nor authoritative, but I’ve put some thought into what I think is changing how we manage, find, and use digital stuff and may as well share it. Time permitting I will turn some of these into fuller posts which point to some clear examples and have a bit more discussion, but as a first pass…

What, Who, Where, When, Why?

Metadata is changing and so must our perceptions and tools. We’ve had non-bibliographic metadata for a while; but increasing tools and users want and can use other forms of metadata. “What is this about and who is it by?” are still key questions but “What is this for?”, “What do you think of this?” “Is this still the same object as it was three years ago?” “What has been done to this object since it’s been in the system?” “Where is this?” “Who owns this?” are all now questions being asked of digital resources. Tools and users are looking for as much information as they can get their hands on. Sometimes this information stands in the object’s stead (like the ‘traditional’ catalogue), but increasingly it’s information that sits alongside the object and provides connections (to other objects or for tools).

Universities (and other organisations) and are beginning to have the opportunity to join up the different systems and data they hold.

Conversations about data duplication are not new and often the problems besetting institutional connectivity are cultural rather than technical, but there does seem to be some sense change. Technical change and new connections may not always be on the scale of Cardiff’s engagement with SOA, but maybe linking student or staff registration services with library/ e-resource user management is a little closer, and when the technical systems are in place perhaps we’ll get better at data management.

As more institutions begin to consider what they do with their scientific datasets, digital curation is becoming a real challenge/ practice.

Reuse of datasets as more institutions develop VREs may increase the demand for/ on local dataset storage

Resource-oriented views of the world are growing in prominence.

this has been discussed extensively elsewhere but there does seem to be a trend to making repository and digital library resources more web-friendly. This shift is most evidenced in OAI-ORE.

Annotation is here to stay

We’re getting used to annotations whether we use tools built into systems or external tools. When we chose between 10 relevant items what Joe in Newcastle thought about the article, image, or food processor does influence our behaviour, and that of the users of our services. More importantly we need to make sure that it’s easy for users to ‘annotate’ our stuff in external services – repositories and digital libraries need add this article to my del.icio.us or digg buttons as much as any other online resource.

Mainstream web protocols are seeing more use in the library community

more and more repositories now come with refinable RSS feeds for new items. Atom is seeing a lot of use as part of a deposit API (SWORD) or as a binding for OAI-ORE. These are some examples of mainstream web protocols increasingly used by libraries. This means the protocol development doesn’t depend on community development or maintenance and that, alongside the specific library tools, there’s a greater chance you can take what you produce and mash it into whatever new tool appears in the wider web community. [The importance of this may lurk behind some of ORE’s current discussions about to implement ORE-resource maps in ATOM. ]

CRIG motto “the coolest thing to do with you data will be thought of by someone else”

People are going to want to metadata and resources you create or manage in ways you don’t anticipate and, if you let them, some of what they think of will be good. Of course not everything should be freely reusable and not everything people do with it is going to be good but, in the context of publicly-funded instituions freeing up metadata and content should be our default starting point.

Institutional-related content is not going to only be held in the institutions

Stuff connected to institutions is increasingly going to be all over the place – academics deposit in subject repositories or slideshare and content produced about institutional life ends up on blogs and flickr. Institutions could try to control what happens but there is a greater opportunity for them to both collect resources from their community (a list of academics on slideshare; an aggregated feed of departmental delicious or connotea tags) and make sure their resources are pushed out to other services too (publicising branded resources, offering training on web2.0 tools, making sure institutional repository content is also push to relevant subject repositories).

Branding, publicity, goodwill

7 and 8 create a lot of this; and I think as a community we’re beginning to understand this (for example: Library of Congress on Flickr, the various Opencourseware initiatives).I’m not saying it’s always going to make ‘commerical’ sense but sometimes it will and we’re getting better at remembering how much of our ‘income’ is public funding.

Services should talk to each other…

Many of the web tools and services that people use are beginning to offer the possibility of much greater connectivity. This ranges from connected, portable, or shared authentication/ identity (such as linking hotmail accounts; OpenId developments) to api-based access to content (such as: twitter/ ebay/ del.icio.us etc in netvibes, flickr photos pulled into animoto). I think there is a growing expectation that content and services should not be locked into one particular platform or interface.

Good metadata matters..

I’ve less direct evidence for this but I think that more we want to engage with all of the above, the more we need good metadata and more of it. The more tools and services scale the more that greater metadata quality is required (though see 1. this does not necessarily mean we should spend more time cataloguing). The clearest presentation I’ve seen of this in practice was in connection to IVIMEDS.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while for work and find it a really good way to keep track of stuff. Although to be honest I find it most useful as an ability to keep track of other people’s stuff. I spend a few minutes each morning looking at what my network has been bookmarking or things that have surfaced through my subscribed tags. A little collective intelligence goes a long way and I’ve also found it a good way to share relevant resources with colleagues as I find them.

this week has been an interesting one for my del.icio.us account for two reasons – Wordle and Firefox3

I think I just about made it into the launch day download for Firefox 3 but was disheartened to find that some of my favourite add-ons have died. tinyurl; morning coffee; and the del.icio.us plugin.

A quick check today showed that although it wasn’t showing up as an update del.icio.us have a new toolbar plugin – so uninstall the old one (how archaic ) and load the new one… easy…

well not quite – the new one comes with a wizard… and like most Wizards (or other mysterious characters at the beginning of a game or story) this one offers a choice and not an especially pleasant one. Enter the wonderful new world of Firefox 3 with a del.icio.us toolbar to make life easy and either – upload all your existing offline bookmarks or discard them…

The new delicious plugin is designed to replace the browser’s bookmarking functionality. Thankfully there is an option to keep these newly uploaded bookmarks private (so that you’re only sharing them with del.icio.us and Yahoo…) – this means that my network and the wider world will be spared all the out of date trivia in my bookmarks- for now at least.

As I work through the 600 new bookmarks I have on del.icio.us to see which of them I will usefully make public (lots of good older references), which I will delete (how many links to old meet-o-matics is it possible to have), which I will keep to myself (do I really need to publicize the login screens for all the work systems I manage or just how long I played Battlefield 2 for…)

I can certainly see why del.icio.us might want to have all this information but I feel it’s a bit sneaky changing a simple tool into a data gathering monster. And that’s without thinking about the chaos when advanced users opt to make all their migrated bookmarks public… what do you have in your bookmark closet?

You might ask why anyone would chose to use this plugin. In short it just makes it easier to use del.icio.us and I now get a little browser email everytime some posts a link for me or a little button which tells my network is active (a button that, I suspect, will never be greyed out). There is something sadly cool about this.

That brings me neatly to why I would want to spend time making bookmarks public and tagging them. In part this has to do with something resembling my own machinations of knowledge management and in part because sharing knowledge (or at least pointers to knowledge) lets cool things this happen… form the serious to the just plain brilliant (if perhaps not immediately purposeful). Wordle http://wordle.net/ visualises your tag clouds- it’s not a particualrly new idea – it just does it wel. You can give it a textblock or a del.icio.us uesr name and it does this

These are my tags as of yesterday – once I get all my new links public this may change somewhat but I’ll have to wait and see.

edit(for the gamers): Should really have called this – ‘All your bookmark belong to us’